Lost and Found

I have been reading this book since I left the States. It's a series of essays with a heavy emphasis on memoir and art and cultural history, all about the concept of being lost. I have found it almost viscerally poignant to my current experience at times. I haven't picked it up in over a week now. Partially because I find it difficult to read in English when I am concentrating on learning Spanish so much. Partially because I hate the sadness of finishing books I really like.

Today I used an ATM on my way to the grocery store and thought that the cash that I withdrew fell out of my pocket somewhere on my way home. I looked in every pocket, the bathroom, my shopping bags. I was so annoyed/frustrated/upset about what amounted to carelessness on my part. But then my roommate found the cash on the kitchen floor. The relief of finding something I though was lost was such a wonderful sensation. Even something unemotional like money (an amount that will have very little long term consequence, anyway). It was like a really nice surprise. There may even be something about the feeling that's similar to falling in love. Or at least a fraction of it. Finding something that really belongs to you that you had been living without.

I constructed an inventory of things I have lost over the years that I really miss. About seventy-five percent of them are winter outerwear (that blue hat from tenth grade, a pair of my grandmother's gloves, the perfect street-pashmina, etc) and the rest are single earrings. None of them is worth nearly as much as the cash I misplaced today. Probably not even all of them collectively. But if, through some strange tidal flow of the universe, any of those things were to come back to me the elation I'd feel would be exponentially greater. I even have a box full of mate-less, former favorite earrings awaiting that unlikely turn of events.

Maybe the lesson here is that I care far too much about material things. That objects shouldn't hold such emotional worth for me. Everything should be dispensable. But it could also mean that, despite all evidence to the contrary, I might want to fall in love again.

Book Discussion Group: On imagery and nostalgia

On my way home from work tonight I had this strong bout of nostalgia for a college I never attended. It was a longer wait for the F train than usual and I was reading to pass the time. I started Americana by Don DeLillo earlier this week, mostly because it seems like everyone is always talking about how great he is, and even though I don't feel like I'm really into it (like I won't read another chapter instead of going to sleep at night), I like it. Anyhow, between the wait and the train ride I was probably reading for almost an hour. And I was thinking about this conversation I had with my friend Jean last night about descriptions of place and how important they are to stories and, at least so far, Americana takes place in New York City, so the descriptions are vivid in this way that they are not only so obviously and brilliantly concocted out of images from the mid-twentieth century cultural zeitgeist, but they are also images and places I live among everyday (or at least to the extent that I am in Manhattan, which is often enough).

So my nostalgia had to do with this fantasy I have about what life in "normal college" dorm is like. In this nostalgic reverie I pictured myself returning to the dorms at one-thirty in the morning and going down to the second floor (because my nostalgia is specific enough to place me on the fourth) to knock on the door of some dreamy English major I knew would be up (probably reading Proust or something awful like that). Anyhow, we would sit on his bed at a perpendicular angle to one another, with my back against the wall at the head of the bed and his against the wall against the length of the bed, and eventually, after dissecting imagery and the power of the ego in literature or whatever words we were using to mean "It's really fucking good the way he says that," I would tuck my feet under his thighs and we would feel really close but probably not even kiss because those situations always feel too heavy and cliche anyhow.

This fantasy is fraught for several reasons, starting with my cynical disdain for English majors and Proust. But also because it reveals the ways that my college experience was purposefully a-typical in a way that highlights how my late teens were to a large degree shaped by a desire to be "a-typical" and how it's strange but I sometimes regret that. But really only because lately my life is full of times like now when it's after three in the morning and I can't think of a single person who it would be appropriate to call in order to discuss literature. Maybe I'm just too old for that.

But when I came home I was glad to find Richard awake and we drank beers and watched the season finale of Greek, which is really a fantastically sincere show, but maybe feeds my college nostalgia-regret fantasies a little too much.

Post-Potter Depression

Graduating from college didn't really leave the expected impression on me. It was sort of an anti-climax. I felt the same as I did during college. Except everyone started asking me what I was going to do next. Since I am doing exactly the same thing this question doesn't really bother me (right). However, finishing the final Harry Potter book around 7am today has left me with a sort of empty grown up feeling. Unlike college, which was sort of disjointed and alienating for me, Harry Potter has been a consistent part of my life since I was sixteen. Sure there are lots of comparisons about loss of youth I could make, but part of me feels like the up-all-night joy and excitement I got from reading Harry Potter books is gone forever. While I will probably read anther book that makes me want to stay up all night rather than put it down, I will probably never go to semi-illegal ends to obtain a book before its release date again. And I will grow old my hair will fall out and I'll start eating pureed foods and squinting to see the typeface in a book late at night. Sigh. Today it seems like I can see lines and discolorations on my face. It's probably only from staying up late, but it can't be long until I really do start to get old.